Cult TV Blog

There are a number of things (among others) that appear about this episode on wikipedia: 1) Drake (don't forget the theme of this run through is to see how much water the John Drake/Number 6 identification carries) makes no attempt to escape or resist The Village's attempts to control him; 2) Patrick Cargill, who plays Number 2, also played Thorpe in Many Happy Returns, & it not stated whether or not they are the same person;  3) it gives the themes as insecurity, paranoia & conspiracy thinking in a leader (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_into_Anvil). Of these three I personally would be interested in the second, & am choosing to avoid the first & the third in this discussion. They take their place at the head of this post to set up a sort of 'orthodoxy' in understanding this episode, so that I can subvert it. For a start, the quote from Goethe explains the philosophy behind the more episode: 'You must be master and win, or serve and lose,...

How I love this episode! It is strange, because I love The Prisoner & this episode is one of my favourites, despite it being definitely the odd one out. For me what marks it out is the apparent absence of institutional behaviour on the part of Drake: by this I mean that most episodes are marked by at least some manoeuvring with the authorities in The Village, & while present here it is not apparent that that is what is happening until the end. In fact institutional neurosis is present in this episode: a major aspect of institutional behaviour is the fear of reprisals if you do something wrong, twisted in this case to mean that the authorities create an environment where there is something wrong, presumably calculated to create discomfort. The natural question would be to ask yourself what has happened & where everyone has gone: the obvious answer is that something has happened that you don't know about! A further institutional element in this story is that by makin...